The key to marketing a town is determining and promoting the town's "differential advantage" or uniqueness that would make people want to visit or live there. Exercises to help communities gain important insights into the town's competitive edge include a brainstorming session with knowledgeable community members, a visitor…

Thirty-one female psychology students with a mean age of 31 years (all enrolled at a public liberal arts institution at which 49% of all students are over the age of 25) were invited to participate in a focus group to discover their perspective of the college experience and identify their concerns as nontraditional students. The group moderator…

This research study investigated the concern that too many women were dropping out of the Ph.D. program in chemistry and getting an M.S. degree. A major focus was on the differences and similarities in the reasoning between males and females who dropped out. The major source of data was focus group interviews involving 3 people in each of 2…

To help the Middle College National Consortium to learn about students' perspectives on the transition to college, the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching (NCREST) conducted two focus groups with 13th grade students at two Middle College-Early College high schools. There was consensus by the students in the focus…

In the fall of 2003, PACER Center's Parent Partnership Project for Children's Mental Health conducted a survey to better understand what parents and families need from the children?s mental health system in Minnesota. The research team developed a survey questionnaire, a telephone interview, and a focus group session directed at learning what was…

This study addressed the construction and application of an instrument to measure students' perceptions of their resident assistant's ability to complete specified job skills. Survey items were written from identified training objectives necessary for effective, intentional interactions with students. The instrument has been constructed following…

This report gives the results of a study that probes how typical individuals think about religion, faith, and personal morality. Alongside their belief in the power of religion to help individuals become better people, most people are also instinctively wary about injecting religion directly into politics, the public schools, and public life in…

Personal narratives provide typically unabashed enthusiasm for sabbatical leave programs, but few studies have explored the results of sabbaticals and the impact that these sabbaticals can and do have on the department and the university. This paper reports on the creation of an assessment instrument to measure the impact of a faculty member's…

In order to evaluate a required health and wellness course at Salem State College, the researcher conducted a triangulation study using a student questionnaire, an instructor survey, and student focus group interviews. The two single session focus group interviews were held during students' last week of the course. One student from each of 21…

This booklet offers strategies for leading small groups as they investigate the status of school reform. The tools described were used in the collection of information from focus groups in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Some of the groups were comprised of school practitioners, while others were made up of providers of support to schools,…

Most, if not all research on communication apprehension (CA) in Japan has been theory driven. While a theory driven approach may be useful to help understand certain aspects of CA in Japan, a ground-up approach offers the opportunity to understand in depth, the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of those who suffer from CA. This paper reports the…

This paper discusses three examples of the use of student voices to inform external-partner activities in Chicago's public schools. The text is based on a collaborative effort directed at diagnosing the needs of the Chicago schools. The article focuses on the perceptions of the probation process as reported by student-focus groups. Some of the…

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) undergraduates are a population at-risk of noncompletion of their degrees, but they are almost entirely overlooked in the career-development literature. The Mentoring Web model described in this paper uses resources within the LGB community at a large Southwestern university to provide one-on-one mentoring, focus…

Focus groups were conducted to inform and support the development of faculty, teaching assistant, and administrator training materials and strategies as part of the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) Prof project at the University of Washington, Seattle. Focus groups were conducted at the 23 postsecondary…

Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock conducted a study of faculty attitudes about the use of technology in the college classroom using electronic focus group sessions. This paper examines the electronic focus group data collection procedure. The electronic sessions were conducted in a decision-support center on campus with 13…